Preliminary Fatigue Life Prediction of Composite Wing under Gust Spectrum Loads Using a CUF-Based Approach
Elisa TORTORELLI, Marianna VALENTE, Giuseppe PALAIA, Erasmo CARRERA
Abstract. This work presents a framework for predicting the fatigue life of a composite aircraft wing under von Kármán gust spectrum loads. The approach integrates the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) for high-fidelity structural modeling with Dirlik’s frequency-domain method for fatigue estimation. The influence of turbulence intensity and scale on fatigue life is examined, demonstrating that the proposed CUF-based method offers an accurate and computationally efficient tool for early-stage design of composite aerospace structures.
Keywords
Fatigue Life, Composite Structures, CUF, Gust
Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Elisa TORTORELLI, Marianna VALENTE, Giuseppe PALAIA, Erasmo CARRERA, Preliminary Fatigue Life Prediction of Composite Wing under Gust Spectrum Loads Using a CUF-Based Approach, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 1298-1303, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-225
The article was published as article 225 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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